


we're taller in this dimension

by curse_brekker



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Eponine-centric, Gen, Grantaire & Éponine Thénardier Friendship, Les Amis de l'ABC - Freeform, Minor Character Death, alternately: eponine gets everything she's ever wanted (or does she?), eponine moves out & builds a family of her own. that's it. that's the fic., grief? idk., i wrote this for ME but y'all can read it if you want!, les amis make their cameos, no beta we die like les amis de l'abc, the thenardiers are rich but like. at what cost., they're all reincarnated college students
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-02-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:13:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22923124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curse_brekker/pseuds/curse_brekker
Summary: It’s okay if they’re assholes together, you know, for verisimilitude.(or: Éponine Thénardier goes to college in another state.)
Relationships: Grantaire & Éponine Thénardier, Éponine Thénardier & Gavroche Thénardier, Éponine Thénardier & Les Amis de l'ABC
Comments: 9
Kudos: 20





	we're taller in this dimension

**Author's Note:**

> title is a paraphrased lyric from frank ocean's white ferrari.

The girl dreams.

Her dreams are a shuddering mess of blood and gasoline, fumes of nitric acid in the air and blood curling screams: a tangle of death and defeat.

Some nights she wakes up in a cold sweat in her bed, gasping when her hands clutch the sheets as one drowning would clutch at a log, as though they and how tight her grip is are the only things that tie her to reality and not a café—what was its name again? Something with an M or L, wasn’t it?—and students, young and full of dreams (not students, a voice in her mind supplies, _revolutionaries_ ) who gathered there and spoke of a brighter tomorrow that awaited them, when the people would rise against the tyranny as though soaring archangels in flight, destroying the selfish and the vain and the cruel as their light set the world on fire.

The girl glances at the clock that stands on top of her nightstand. It’s four in the morning and it’s late December; it’s freezing. She sincerely doubts she can go back to sleep again, but tries, futile as it may be; ducks under the heavy quilt with a much abused stuffed toy she’d absolutely hated at the age of three tucked inside her arms. 

_I had a dream, you know,_ a voice whispers by her ear as the sun rises hours later and she shivers underneath her quilt _, that one day my life would be so much different from this hell I am living in._

 _So what?_ She thinks wearily; sleep tugging on her mind at last. _Hell’s_ made _of people, and where do you escape from them?_

* * *

There is a boy in her dreams with eyes the color of the morning sky. There are several boys, in fact, playing at revolution. A revolution that is doomed to fail.

But this one is different, somehow.

The boy chokes on his own vomit some days. Dark circles fringe his eyes and he always has a bottle in his hands, as though it’s the only thing that tethers him to his surroundings. Appearance-wise, he is ugly. His dark curls are grimy; his face marred by acne scars and a nose that she supposes has been broken at least twice. His breath disgusts the other boy, who sits beside him, and his teeth are yellow and his hands are paint-stained, full of calluses. He has a stout build with defined, lithe muscles and high cheekbones that seem out of place on his face, but a protruding stomach that indicates an athlete who hasn’t exercised in ages.

But somehow his eyes stare holes through every barricade and layer of defense his friends set up for their cause, especially the leader, who preaches about how the people will rise and the spark will ignite and transform into an inferno that will set all the wrongs of the world alight: burn them away.

The leader is wrong, has no idea how he’s leading his comrades towards their deaths.

In the dim lights of the café, amidst good cheer and patriotic fervor, when the boy with cerulean eyes clutching a bottle of wine like a lifeline picks apart his friends’ arguments with drunken precision and crude jokes the girl thinks back to a world where he could’ve made a fan-base just by doing this. Hopeless optimists, he calls them.

She agrees.

The blue-eyed boy laughs with his bald friend and the limping man with a cane, talks about philosophy with a boy with glasses and kind eyes and pats a curly-haired boy with dimples on the back, braids a poet’s ethereal golden hair with flowers; fights and drinks absinthe with a heavily muscled man in his late twenties while he converses with a worker who has an odd accent about the brushwork of a Delacroix painting. His smile is self-deprecating and when he winks at their fearless leader and toasts him a glass of wine, the object of his devotion scowls in disdain.

The leader is frustrated by him, because why would a man who doesn’t care for the greater good of the republic, its people, ever associate himself with them? How can someone live without believing in anything except for his next bottle of wine? If you don’t stand for anything, he wants to know from the blue-eyed cynic, what will you fall for?

The girl knows the answer. Screams it at his face, one day.

Her voice doesn’t carry.

* * *

There is a place in the city she calls the avenue of broken dreams.

Most college dropouts and starving artists have made its squats into their homes: the rent is cheap and the entire place smells of smoke and weed. Her brother lives there. He looks ravaged to her, in a sense, by the claws of life. He’s twenty one, but the sallow hollows under his wide-apart eyes suggest otherwise.

To her family her brother is as good as dead. To her, he’s just another example of the weight of heavy expectations. He didn’t like mathematics and he _had_ to be in a STEM career, because what would people say to their father otherwise? That his oldest child was such a disappointment, such a waste of space? (“No son of mine will ever be so _rotten,_ ” their father had snarled at her brother’s GPA). He tried, she knows, he tried his best and didn’t succeed and sought comfort in heroin. In the end, he had dropped out of his Ivy League college and began painting on commission, making impressionist art with swirls and colors that made her head spin. He’s planning on going to community college again, he’d told her the last time she’d seen him. He would show everyone art wasn’t something that ruined your life. 

_(“I am_ ashamed _to call you my son.” A quiet thunder. It seems to make something split in her ears, and even two rigorous years of AP Biology isn’t enough to help her discern what: funny, how useless an education feels like in moments such as these. The room makes it echo.)_

He will overdose on heroin today in his run-down squat that he shares with his girlfriend. His girlfriend will commit suicide tomorrow and the day after that their neighbors will find them curled like parentheses around each other, even in death (she used to mock his flair for drama mercilessly. It’s a shame she won’t get to, anymore, and how ironic is it that the entire ordeal of his death itself was worthy of a soap opera but hidden away from the public eye in its garish sum total?).

His sister will not know of his death until the next month when their mother drunkenly babbles out the reasons as to why she is a failure, tears streaming down her face and the haze of vodka evident in her pupils.

Her nightmares will feature her brother in them from then, instead of fierce revolutionaries doomed to their useless deaths.

* * *

When she graduates high school as Valedictorian and takes her diploma from the principal and her mouth robotically forms the words to a speech that has the audience clapping up a storm, she doesn’t see a single familiar face among the seats of her high school gymnasium.

She knows it’s merely her imagination, but a phantom hand grips her shoulder as she stands on the dais during her speech in support, steadies her gait as the steps leading to the ground below make her feet falter—and for _once_ in her life, she’s glad to be haunted.

* * *

She is a freshman at a college thousands of miles away from her busy city and the ornate flat she grew up in. Her father urged her to major in mechanical engineering as well, and had been disappointed— _devastated_ —when she chose to major in criminology.

But in her case, their mother had been cautious, setting up a fund for her that nobody else could touch without the girl’s permission. Her father has turned into a bitter man after her brother’s death; there are heavier circles under his eyes than his son’s and he rarely comes home from his office before one in the morning. Her mother is a different creature entirely, merely existing and not living a single day and blurring through life buried under the pretense that there is nothing wrong. Because if you didn’t see it, it didn’t happen, did it?

What would they call their family in textbooks? The girl often wonders. Broken? But broken things can be fixed, glued back together. The cracks in the foundation of their relationships run deeper than any she has ever acknowledged and no amount of filling them with more cement can fix it, because at this point, like oil and water, it wouldn’t mix, just stay floating over their lives as the remnants of lost love and happiness, which like the lights of her soon-to-be old room, have fused and probably need to be replaced.

She’s not willing to play electrician alone, this time.

The day she moves into another state, another town far away from the traffic and lights and the cold sleepless nights of the city she once called home, she reminds herself repeatedly there is no one more imprisoned than the ones who live under the fallacy of freedom.

The town is a quaint one, compared to the busy city she’d abandoned for this new, unknown place filled with smatterings of small cafés and pubs, the light of the lampposts casting a soft glow over them and the shops and buildings when dusk has settled and pedestrians who bustle past her to their destinations.

It’s new, it’s terrifying and it makes her want to explode.

She drags her suitcase with her through the cobbled streets and hails a cab. 

“Step on it,” she will tell the cabbie. She will find the man’s answering grin luminous.

* * *

Her roommate is a girl who has the darkest eyes she has ever seen. She is majoring in Marine Biology, the girl will tell her with a welcoming smile; she wears thick-framed glasses that skirt a dangerous line between cool and hipster, and she has a constellation of freckles spread out across her cheeks. She works part time in a nearby fair trade coffee shop that’s one of the most popular haunts of college students and helps out with tech in the local theater. She is a junior and offers to show her around and the girl takes her up on it.

After freshman orientation, classes begin, and the girl finds herself writing paper after paper, analyzing cases after cases that range from murder to white collar crimes. The most fascinating class, however, is Crime Psych, to be honest. It’s compelling and sickening at the same time, learning what had been going through a man’s mind while he killed his own teenaged daughter to save her from the advances of the drug lord’s circle he ran in, to understand how and why psychopaths lack empathy, how evolutionary theory has a part to play in the motives of a murder.

She chooses her minor in Art History, though; it’s sentimental of her, she supposes. It’s an impulsive decision, one she will most likely regret, because her artistic skills when weighed against interpreting literature or composing music are severely lacking. She’s never had any interest in it, either. She cannot tell people which Neo-classicism piece is the best and which sucks the most. When it comes to painting, she is a fish stranded in a desert.

Her brother would have laughed at her, if he were here, and told her to leave it and choose a course she would actually be able to pass, and that is the reason why, to prove him wrong because she no longer has the power to stick her tongue out at him, even though every single aspect of it has terrible idea written over it in neon lights, she enrolls herself in it.

* * *

She regrets this decision of hers. She regrets it immensely.

The professor who teaches the class is nice enough, dissecting paintings after paintings by emotions and brush strokes and swirls and lines and angles like picking apart needles lost in a stack of hay. He actually makes it sound as though there are adventures to be sought within each of them, mysteries to be solved and curiosity to be satisfied. He knows each and every one of their history and how many times they’ve been stolen and found again. He talks about sculptures and terracotta and folk art of the globe with such zeal that it’s easy to get lost in his voice, the way he talks as though art is the key to the secrets of the universe and its history the most glorious one humanity has held onto.

“Art is the only thing that survives,” he says to them on their first day, “it’s one of the very few things—no matter what medium you prefer—that allows you to leave your mark on the world after thousands of years. It sees tragedy; it sees hope and it sees the core of this flawed, flawed humanity. Isn’t the concept of that breathtaking?”

Her brother would have loved this guy, she thinks dazedly during one of her professor’s rants on Giotto’s paintings breaking the traditions of the middle ages, who created a window to a new world--the like of which had never been seen before. 

It’s such a shame he missed out on this, she thinks bitterly, that the star that had shone the brightest in her life fell the hardest.

* * *

Granted, it wasn’t her fault college life wasn’t what the movies made it out to be. She and her roommate were close acquaintances, even friends perhaps, but not BFFs. They didn’t braid each other’s hair, nor did they paint each other’s nails ridiculous shades of pink. There wasn’t any guy in particular who caught her eye, she avoided frat parties and had no desire to hit bars during the weekend with a fake ID—and she didn’t find the time at all: the first semester had been depressingly hectic and if her roommate didn’t shove food down her throat or threaten to give her decaf when she made her coffee in the mornings if she didn’t go to sleep at one o’ clock at the very least, she was pretty sure she would’ve developed a serious case of insomnia or died of starvation.

The two of them hold Tom and Jerry and horror movie marathons in their room on the weekends though, and often, a group of her roommate’s theater friends join them, bring over popcorn and licorice with them that tastes like heaven and it’s only because of that the girl forgives them for messing up her pillows when they lounge on their beds and laughs at their jokes.

It surprises her, when at one point she realizes that she knows her roommate’s friends well, well enough to consider them her friends as well. Her life here has fallen to a routine she is well-adjusted with, she realizes with a start one night, even though her father doesn’t speak to her on the phone when she calls and her mother always gives her clipped three-word answers at most when she asks her questions about life back (home? is it really?) at the city of her past.

She is happy and there are people who care about her without strings attached; she is not an investment to profit from or a doll to be prettied up and displayed, like a _thing_ to be admired and venerated, as though a piece of furniture paraded around. She is a human being with thoughts and emotions and opinions that people respect and it feels _wonderful_ , to do simple things on her own and not get them done by a housekeeper, to have the freedom of going wherever she wants at any time of the day.

Then the thing she’s been dreading happens, her Art History professor assigns them partners to reimagine classic paintings and bring them to life in their shared imaginations as quote, modern interpretations, unquote. She has to hand in the piece in two weeks and she is lost in a vortex of anxiety. Her assigned partner, she recognizes with a start, has the eyes the color of the morning sky, a color she remembers only seeing in the eyes of a cynic in the vivid and weirdly lucid dreams she remembers from her senior year of high school. He has the same dark, wild curls and a sardonic twist to his mouth and he sneers at her as if she is an idiot who got run over by a double decker bus out of not looking both left and right while crossing the street.

He has the same broken nose. His face is still covered in faint acne scars, but he looks cleaner. The circles under his eyes are thinner and his breath doesn’t reek of wine. He is, however, the stereotypical embodiment of an artsy college student who has paint staining his jeans to his cuticles—wait, even his hair is splattered with paint on some days, she will come to notice in a week.

He knows her name and gives her his in an odd accent, and there is something about his smile that has her driving up the walls of her room at night a few weeks later. He comes from France and is an Visual Arts major (surprise, surprise) and doing his minor on Art History; his breath smells of nicotine and his hands are almost always stained by acrylic paint and he is the nightmare of people who actually use combs to brush their hair. He has too many hobbies, he informs her, he fences, dances, boxes and works part time in the local theater with her roommate. He likes realism in art, and she will say she favors impressionism, and he will mock her mercilessly for it.

“I know nothing about the practical aspects of art,” she warns him. “I doubt I can even hold a paintbrush properly.”

“I can tell,” he replies, and in the soft glow of the lamp posts his eyes sparkle. They’re the bluest things she has ever seen. “That’s why I’m dreading doing this assignment with you.”

“You don’t seem like you are,” she says, narrowing her eyes at him. His countenance is the epitome of smug self-assurance and it irks her, for some reason. 

“At least you could help me select a painting, Tinkerbell. The interpretation of it can be a team effort. We’ll work something out together.” He shrugs in response, lighting a cigarette and taking a long drag from it.

“You realize you’ll kill yourself by smoking, don’t you?” The girl glares at her disheveled looking companion. “You’re losing three minutes of your lifespan by doing so. Your lungs are probably shriveled and look like they’re drowning in _tar—”_

“Whoa there, Judgy Tinker bell,” the boy grins, holding up his hands in the air. “Slow down. Life’s the shittiest invention of a God I refuse to believe isn’t a bastard grinding us all down,” he takes another drag of his cigarette. “Plus, it doesn’t last and it isn’t good for anything. We’ll break our necks simply living. What’s wrong with having a little fun during the dark times, huh?”

“First of all,” her glare hardens as she involuntarily visualizes throttling him. It has a calming effect, really. “I’m not a Disney character. Second, are you sure you aren’t a pessimist? I’m getting the feeling that the road to self-destruction is a long and winding one. Third, Margaret Atwood? Really?”

“Realist to the bone, Tink,” he winks, and her eyes hurt from all the glaring. He exhales more smoke through his nostrils. “I would tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

“Only pessimists call themselves realists,” she shoots back, raising her chin. “And you speak as if that line hasn’t already been used enough.”

“Touché, my dear hopeless optimist.” He smirks, and she freezes for a moment.

She remembers him saying the very same thing in a life far away from this place. Perhaps hundreds of years ago, but she remembers; she remembers agreeing with him, vividly, being the unnoticed spectator amidst his friends’ meetings and laughter and ideals.

She remembers him dying for a cause he didn’t even believe in.

“I’m not an optimist,” she tells him through gritted teeth. “And feel free to exclude me from your nihilistic rampages.”

“This is love at first sight, Tink,” he declares with a chuckle before they part ways. “You know me better than I know myself.”

 _I do and I hate myself for it,_ the girl doesn’t say aloud. It’s kindness, she tells herself, in the long run.

* * *

The boy falls into her life like he does everything else, slowly and condescendingly; yet getting to the heart of it like he does when it comes to their somewhat passive-aggressive debates. They hand in their assignment and get an A because apparently their professor adores the painting’s modernized version of their interpretation. It’s Van Gogh’s _Starry Night over the Seine,_ and their version looks over the bank of the Ganges, which had been the boy’s idea, overlooking a street of harrowed pilgrims in white and barefoot children. There’s a look of gnawing want in their eyes, one she can’t quite put her finger on; it haunts her, for some reason. The swirling stars of the painting are more vibrant and the buildings in it instead of the village of the original make it look ethereal somehow, it seems to the girl, who had merely helped in choosing the painting and sat in silence in the boy’s apartment while he worked on it.

(“Why’d you even _take_ an Art History course if you have no interest in it whatsoever?” The boy groused, pinching his lips when the girl plopped on the couch of his shaggy studio apartment, proving true to her word that she really was as useless as she’d initially thought herself to be. “Isn’t that a huge waste of time?”

The girl had looked up from her copy of _Origins of Crime_ and stared him in the eye. “Sentimentality, I suppose. And I was curious, to be honest. My brother loved painting.”

“And that concerns the price of tea in China because...?” He asked, raising an eyebrow.

“He’s dead,” she said flatly, relishing his answering flinch. “I liked composing music more; I used to write songs once, even. This endeavor is my one attempt at preserving his memory. Anything else?”

“I’m sorry,” he replied quietly, paintbrush still in hand. The canvas on the easel was standing a little crooked, and the apparent swirling town of _Starry Night_ had formed in the dark, bluish on the other side of the Ganges. “How’d he die?”

“Heroin overdose,” she shrugged. “The funny thing is that I didn’t even know he was dead until the next month.”

“Oh,” he breathed, grimacing apologetically. “I’m sorry, that was very insensitive of me.”

“Don’t worry,” she’d told him. “You could never do worse than the asshole I call father.”)

She even invites him on the Popcorn and Movie Nights she and her roommate host in their apartment. Her roommate is enthralled to see him, and though she’ll never say it out loud, the girl even finds his jokes funny, this time. 

* * *

(She finds his jokes funny the next time, too. But don’t tell him that. In that case she would probably die of mortification in .12 seconds. Seriously, don’t. You don’t want to have an innocent’s blood in your hands, do you?)

* * *

A year passes and he shows up with a coffee and cider before class begins and they walk to their Art History III class together. He begins to show up at her place at least once a week and she thinks that after all these years of her social ineptitude, she deserves this friendship, be it full of passive-aggressive mocking and throwing shade at other people. She likes his brand of honesty, she comes to learn, she likes the way he resembles cut glass, the jagged edges sharp and blunt, likes that all the things that come out of his mouth (except the vitriol when he’s drunk, even she loses her footing when he keeps blathering on about the classics, and people considered _her_ well-read in high school) always seems to be hiding some particular mystery she can’t wait to get to the bottom of.

She likes this weird, kooky but delightfully artsy friend of hers all the same.

After a few weeks of the _Starry Night_ Disaster™ (guess who, guess how), he teaches her how to draw. She isn’t as good as him, ultimately, and she’s even nowhere near the skill level her brother had achieved, but she can manfully admit that her sketches are decent and she’s learned to paint with oils, the paintings she does _do_ end up doing mediocre (she never gets an A again, her professor marks her as a one hit wonder and moves on), but she isn’t complaining. She needs to pass her courses of this module; she doesn’t need to be _passionate_ about passing them. But he’s a great teacher (don’t tell him she said that either, he will get even more self-depreciating than he already is), no matter how much she might have ribbed him and driven him mad with her questions and pathetic attempts at the beginning of this particular endeavor.

During winter break, since her parents are off to a business trip in Europe and there’s no point in wasting money for a ticket back home, she stays. All her friends (she still isn’t very sure that they aren’t hallucinations) have gone to their places with invites for her to join them, which she declined as politely as she could, because for some reason these people liked her, _cared_ for her, made her soup and cuddled with her when she got the flu and brought her assignments for class, what the fuck. Sometimes that was hard to wrap her head around, even though it had already been a year.

The boy and the girl are sitting on her ragged couch, and the television’s blaring Nickelodeon where Spongebob Squarepants is attempting to serenade a sleep-deprived Squidward out of his house.

He’s the only one of their friend group who’s stayed here for the break, and he almost never talks about his family if he can help it, so she doesn’t ask. She knows he used to drink too much in high school, has even been to rehab for his alcoholism before starting college, taken off a year for it. He has a little sister back in France who lives with his grandmother; she’s sixteen and he loves her, but for some reason he never talks about his parents, no matter how long he can rhapsodize about his grandmere’s cooking.

“But I don’t understand why you can’t believe that given the proper incentive, people _can_ work together to make a difference. Granted, I’m not the person who’s capable of giving them said incentive, but there are people in the world who can, who _will_.” She grits out. This is the same argument all over again.

“Utilitarianism is bullshit, Tink.” He chugs his coffee, which he likes ‘as black as his soul’. And that’s a direct quote, believe it or not. “People work in the name of self preservation, if the thing you’re rallying them for doesn’t concern them directly, they won’t move their asses from were they’re sitting, not even an inch.”

“I never said that they didn’t!” She huffs. “Say, we need the rich frat idiots to protest the rising price of textbooks—don’t laugh, I’m not saying I will,” she glares daggers at him as he snorts loudly and resolutely ignores his cry of, “Stereotyping!” and barrels on, “We could give them the proper incentive, perhaps free pizza for a week? I dunno, maybe anonymously make their frat house a living hell if they don’t comply—”

“That’ll be the same thing as harassing them, and well, like I said, this won’t affect them directly, you’d have better luck gathering regular students that aren’t money-shitting dicks. The pizza thing might even work out in your favor—hypothetically, that is.”

“Did you…did you just say something optimistic?” She gasps, and Spongebob is on his knees, begging Squidward to come back to Krabby Patty. “Who are you and what have you done with my pessimist best friend?”

His eyes widen at the term. He tries to school his face back to a neutral expression, but fails, and his grin is enormous, and to her it’s a country in and of itself: she wants to live there and build a house for just the two of them, though she mentally smacks herself the moment she thinks it. Sometimes her brain cooks up weird metaphors, sue her.

He doesn’t even correct her and retort that no, he’s a capital r Realist, as he’s wont to do. _“Hypothetically,"_ he grouses, but there lurks none of his usual bite in it and she wonders if he too has been just as lonely as her throughout all these years, wonders if they really are the two assholes who’ve never even had a best friend except for each other before this.

He changes the subject then, and the conversation moves on from there.

At the end of that day, when the two of them are snuggled together underneath her fluffiest blanket, and he’s snoring and her arm has fallen asleep, she thinks that it’s okay if they’re assholes. It’s okay if they’re assholes together, you know, for verisimilitude.

* * *

“Bet you can’t tell which star is the brightest one in the Ursa Minor,” he goads her on, and she has to suppress a smirk because that’s actually the easiest question he could have asked. Seriously, the _easiest_.

They’re sitting on the secondhand armchairs she and her roommate collected last year, both of which are in pretty bad shape, she thinks absently, because something is actually pricking her in the ass and its occasional squeak feels suspiciously reminiscent of springs to her, and even the foam looks like its been eaten by moths at some point of its existence. Her place only has the barest minimum of a balcony, and even in the closet-like space lined with creaky bars she’s never quite trusted, in a place that usually makes her at least a little claustrophobic, she feels more content than she ever remembers being. It’s the magic of the night sky, probably, which is cluttered with constellations of stars, bright and burning like the thing inside her chest that has expanded over the past year, the thing she feels like she can’t entirely get a grip on. It’s something about the dark, she decides, that’s the cause of this resplendent serenity.

“Can too. It’s called Polaris _and_ you’re talking to a pro, shithead.” She replies with a flourish of her hands and stares out across the distance absent-mindedly, where an entire city is illuminated with glowing fluorescence. Light pollution, huh, because the number of stars in the sky doesn’t give a shit at all, it seems, since they’re quite literally above them all.

 _And dead_ , supplies a voice in the back of her mind.

He waves a hand across her face, and she’s startled out of her reverie. “And pray tell,” he drawls, with one pathetic imitation of a British accent, “how did the lady become one?”

“Spite,” she mutters under her breath, and slings an arm around the boy’s shoulders. It's no longer surprising, the way affection comes so easy to her now. Her friends--their easy whispers in her ear as they lean their weight against her, soft knocks on her elbows asking for attention; a hand almost always carding through her hair and her head lounging on one lap or another during Tom and Jerry nights, maybe one quiet hand interlacing fingers with her own: gestures that they no longer have to use excuses for to ensure her comfort--have rubbed off on her, it seems.

And as for the things she can't touch, she resolutely ignores the other shadows swirling comfortably along theirs: the taller one turning the dials to the phantom of her old telescope and adjusting the knobs as the smaller one with pigtails bounces on its shoulders in gleeful excitement. He’d always loved telling her that she was a pest, after all, and she thinks she even agrees, now. “I’ve always liked dead things that refused to stay dead," she tells him, her words more of a whisper than a sigh as she finally averts her gaze from them. 

“Morbid, much?” He laughs, and something inside her chest just. Settles. It occurs to her that the instances of the sound being this carefree are negligibly few at best, and she resolves to change this one thing, for her New Year’s resolution. It’s at least something attainable, she tells herself. She’s aiming for sustainable things, nowadays, and though he’s no plant she can water back into the shape of her liking, he reminds her of arable land. That’s a decent place for building homes, she supposes.

She scoffs. “Pot, kettle, buddy.”

* * *

In another life, years—centuries—before, where famine haunts a rebelling city’s streets that are riddled with death and disease, crumbling walls and starving children with fathers for cons and mothers for whores, her name is Éponine and his is Grantaire.

And they never meet.

**Author's Note:**

> hello! thanks for reading! i wrote this when i was 13-ish but i could NOT get the idea of gavroche being the older one this time around and how the thenardiers being rich really doesn't. change /anything/ out of my head. also wanted to see an exploration of how grantaire & eponine might become friends without the "we're both in painful unrequited love & misery loves company" aspect of their most often depicted relationship dynamic in fic, and now here we are. do people still even read les mis fic these days?? anyway. first time posting on here! pat me on the back!! also i've only done minimal editing bc i want a memory of kiddie me so if you spot typos let me know!
> 
> azelma was aborted in this au bc mme thenardier couldn't keep an illegitimate kid. m thenardier has no knowledge of it lol. 
> 
> hmu on tumblr @[seeorseem](https://seeorseem.tumblr.com). pls leave a comment if you liked it!!


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